The international implications of the money phenomenon were to some extent perceived as early as the time of some of the scholastics who found in the universal use of money an instance of the operation of the Law of Nations (jus gentium). The latter term, it is true, was employed by the scholastics rather ambiguously, covering also rules observed by all or most nations in domestic relations. A later writer of the seventeenth century, Samuel Rachel, went further. In his Dissertations on the Laws of Nature and of Nations (1676) he advances the idea that the international circulation of many coins—he mentions especially the Turkish Ducats—proves the existence of a Law of Nations in the modern sense of a law governing the relations among independent states.